On Saturday, January 24, 2026, an ICU nurse named Alex Pretti was wrestled to the ground on the streets of Minneapolis, disarmed of the pistol he was legally carrying, and fatally shot by ICE agents.
He is the second person fatally shot by agents of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) operating in Minneapolis that month. Video of the incident taken by bystanders went viral, and again directly contradicts Kristi Noem’s and DHS’s narrative. In fact, a report by CNN outlined DHS’s development of an internal database of protesters’ personal information. A source told CNN that “Pretti’s name was known to federal agents,” a fact that flies in the face of the prevailing narrative, created by DHS, that officers have been defending themselves during the course of their legal operations.
Many of you may be wondering at this point, “Where is this all going?” Let’s start with the obvious question of Second Amendment rights. If government agents can at any time justify the execution of armed citizens retroactively by citing their possession of firearms then in reality we have no Second Amendment rights. Furthermore, there have been no legal repercussions at the time of this writing for the officer that shot Marimar Martinez in Chicago, Charles Exum. The Department of Justice protected Exum from culpability by pursuing a protective order against the release of information in their case against her (she was shot five times but survived).
This is a bad precedent for the pursuit of any legal recourse against these street executions. The day before Alex Pretti was shot NBC news reported that the FBI agent assigned to the investigation of Renée Good’s shooting resigned after Trump administration officials focused the probe more on the actions of Good and her partner and less on the officer who shot her. In effect the Trump administration’s retaliation tactics will erode the moderate bureaucrats—making sure extreme actions will be increasingly legal.
As a point of comparison it should be noted that neighborhood rapid response networks are filling the power vacuum left by state and federal agencies. These organizations are good because they heighten the struggle; they expand our capacity to offer meaningful resistance; and the government targeting these organizations over time will lead to new tactics and new opportunities for resistance.
However this power vacuum has increasingly also been filled by the class elements of so-called “American society” that are actively participating in immigrant purges. The DHS cowboy who executed Good, Jonathan Ross, has successfully raised $793,605 for himself through GoFundMe. These crowd-sourced funds serve as bounties for the killing of citizens, and thus these DHS agents are more akin to 19th-century runaway slave catchers than immigration officers.
It is worth noting that before the Civil War the class struggle widened with the expansion of slavery: the Dredd Scott case, decided by pro-slavery elements, extended the right of citizens to take their property anywhere as a constitutional guarantee. This meant the total eradication of the distinction between “free states” and “slave states.” As Marx outlined in his 1861 analysis, what the South wanted was the expansion of slavery to all territories and ultimately the triumph of the planter slaveholder class over the federal government. They needed all the offices of government to effect this strategy; and furthermore, “When the Democrats of the North declined to go on playing [their] part . . . the South secured Lincoln’s victory by splitting the vote, and then took this victory as a pretext for drawing the sword from the scabbard.”
As always we can learn a lot from Marx’s historical materialism. He concludes, “The whole movement was and is based, as one sees, on the slave question. Not in the sense of whether the slaves within the existing slave states should be emancipated outright or not, but whether the twenty million free men of the North should submit any longer to an oligarchy of three hundred thousand slaveholders.”
This is closer to the situation that we have now. It must be argued that, similarly, the struggle at hand, without any further development of class consciousness, will boil down to one between the federal government to animate a base of support and elements of the so-called “middle class” to exploit cheap labor. It must not be said that people like Alex Pretti, despite their best intentions, have any hope of liberating the superexploited masses of the imperial core without the analysis of the actually existing class struggle in North America. It is without question that the immigration court system strips immigrants of their rights at will as a way of preserving American imperialism. It is also true that American interventions abroad and sanctions, which are economic warfare, impose conditions that cause immigrants to flee their country, even at great risk to their health and safety, in order to secure higher American wages. As they say on Farmworker TikTok, “en los Estados Unidos se barren los dólares”—“in the US you sweep money up off the floor.” Any attempt by the countries of the Third World to use their resources for the benefit of their own people, as in Venezuela with Nicolás Maduro or Guatemala under Jacobo Arbenz (overthrown in 1954 by the US government and the CIA), is met with vicious punishment and humiliation.
I understand that for many readers my thesis about the middle class protecting their right to exploit cheap labor might come out of the blue. Let me explain the actors in my little play here a bit further: the “middle class” I refer to are American consumers, and the capitalist class are still the evil capitalists you all know. The capitalists that run Starbucks are all vampires, as we know; but it will shock you to learn that the American consumers and the labor unions formed by the American workers are not blameless here either. American wages have always been determined by class struggle against the capitalists to determine their share of the imperial spoils. Those struggles have made America the biggest market in the world, number one in GDP, despite only consisting of about 4 percent of humanity. Our wages are the best in the world, paid in the best money in the world. That’s unequal exchange.
“Undocumented” status allows American businesses to lower the wage floor even beyond legal limits, because workers with it aren’t conferred the rights of citizens. We can observe that these conflicts exist between certain elements of society without assigning blame to individual actors. I don’t believe that Alex Pretti is a bad person because he gave his life in a class struggle antagonistic to the liberation of Latinos. But I do believe that we owe it to ourselves to take an honest accounting of these events so that we can struggle along the correct lines.
From Minneapolis to Caracas, what we have learned in 2026 is that under no circumstances are Latinos allowed to decide their own destiny. Without class analysis we are fighting for the right of the “middle class” of American society to continue to secure the spoils of American imperialism. It will be a long struggle against the beast of imperialism. But the conditions for liberation will arrive and when they do we will all be asked to accept a much lower standard of living.
It’s not hard to guess that most Americans, just like most Israelis, would fight tooth and nail to preserve the system that benefits them. The question is how much would American society have to decay to make that struggle winnable?
Alen Romero is a local Marxist revolutionary writer, thinker, and organizer. He has worked in education for the past seven years.